Thursday, March 17, 2016

With
the arrival of March in the Upper Midwest, our longing for spring takes
on an air of desperation. The fading winter has our senses on high
alert to any sight or sound that hints of warmer temperatures, thawed
soil, and green growth. Often, the first indications of spring in
Wisconsin are aural instead of visual: an unseasonably warm day in late
February has us awake to the sound of long-absent birdsong, a group of
school children splash in a puddle born of quickly melting sidewalk ice,
or we hear the tinkling sounds of ice breaking away on a frozen skating
pond. All this has the water librarians thinking about the soundscapes
of water, and compelling resources available that invite us to immerse
ourselves in audio.

National Parks Service Sound Library

The National Parks Service hosts a Natural Sounds Program
to celebrate and protect the natural and cultural sounds that render a
sense of place in these cherished landscapes, and to preserve the
“soundtrack of nature” critical for ecosystem health and species
survival. The section of the NPS website devoted to this project offers
an, “Exploring Sounds,” sound gallery to access different hydrological
sounds, among many others (do you know the sound a Gulf Toad fish makes?!).
In addition, the various National Parks, themselves, offer resources
related to the Natural Sounds Program in varying capacities. Yellowstone
hosts an extensive sound library where one can listen to multiple geysers, including Old Faithful, the wintertime song of Yellowstone Lake, and the refrain of the Boreal Chorus Frogs in springtime.

Radio Aporee

How might we imagine a “sonic cartography?” A truly astonishing and transformative project called Radio Aporee
does exactly this. Likened to a Google map for sounds, Aporee began in
2006, the brainchild of Berlin-based sound artist and programmer, Udo Noll.
Dedicated to "phonography, field recording (and related practices), and
the art of listening,” Aporee journeys through the complex sounds of
urban, rural, and natural environments across the globe, connecting tens
of thousands of idiosyncratic recordings to pins on a map. Of the
nearly innumerable water-related sounds, one can listen to: the
Milwaukee River at Ceasar Park in Wisconsin, Little Tribune Bay at
Hornby Island in British Columbia, the River Wuhle in Hessersdorf,
Berlin, and a boat in a flooded underground mine in Ottange, France. In
addition, Aporee is a collaborative project, wherein professional and
amateur phonographers submit recordings from a variety of aural
perspectives and artistic orientations.

British Library Sounds Collection

The British Library online has an extensive Sounds Collection with over 60,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments. Their "Water"
section is very easy to navigate and offers recordings of natural water
soundscapes in the categories with which we are most familiar: brooks,
caves, drains, geysers, lakes, rivers, streams, underwater sounds,
waterfalls and waves. Are you looking to meditate to seven minutes of
the sound of a babbling brook? The British Library has your proverbial
back of mindfulness.

Internet Archive: Search Term: Water

We can’t neglect the audio resources found in the Internet Archive
(WaybackMachine). The Internet Archive provides us water sounds ranging
from the common to the utterly quirky, scraped ongoing from websites
all across the Internet. A simple search for “water”
and a click on the audio icon generates over 13,000 clips. While not
all of them are specific to the natural or urban soundscapes of
water—one can listen to several recordings of Christian water baptisms,
or an electronic music mashup composition thematically inspired by
water, or a lecture on groundwater issues—there is no dearth of
recordings of dripping water pipes, water drops, rushing water,
waterfalls, and any audio engineered combination of these. Expand your
search terms anyway you wish—“rivers,” “puddles,” “ponds,” you name
it—and just listen to what treasures you find.

Sonic Water

Sonic Water
combines participatory art installation, water, sound, and images to
introduce us to “cymatics,” or “the process of visualizing sound and
vibrations,” through various types of matter like sand and water. This
is an effort to introduce humans to “seeing sound.” It’s difficult to
describe in words what Berlin media artists Sven Meyer and Kim Porksen
created for exhibition in 2013, so we simply invite you to explore and
earn some cultural cool points in the process. (The Vimeo documentary
linked on the site is a real treat.)